machinehermiter

2 weeks of going to the office and I am convinced the office has no future.

It is great for socializing, taking a long time to get food and a drink, running into people randomly that you wouldn't talk to electronically to socialize more. Then you add in background conversations and constant distraction.

IMO you don't even have to bring in the cost of the office and it already doesn't make sense anymore.

I was pretty horrified by it and the way Pence and Romney have been treated is just foolish by conservatives.

I think a better example though is Flat Earth ideas.

Suppressing people from communicating that the Earth is flat is far more dangerous than the idea that the Earth is flat.

All the West really has going for it is that we are able to entertain ridiculous ideas. This is what lets our creativity percolate on the network.

Once that is gone we have nothing. Just a small % of the global population, kind of lazy, kind of entitled.

So much of the populace has a digital IV drip of constant connection to algorithmic political slogan propaganda machines. If people consume propaganda all day everyday you can't blame them for being highly propagandized.

What else can we possibly expect than this to happen?

I honestly see no evidence that open society is compatible with modern digital communication networks. An authoritarian contagion almost seems an emergent natural property of the network.

The cyberpunk religion I use to believe in couldn't have been more wrong.

I just take solace that I will have been born and lived at the perfect time and place in history. I will have got to be part of this very short lived religion that the internet is the greatest thing for liberalism and freedom ever created when it is really the complete opposite.

I can even zoom out enough to see the historical beauty in such a historic mistake.

Hard to live in more interesting times than right now.

I love driving also. I think the saving grace of all this though is the people that will want self driving are the people that are basically addicted to checking their phone and ridiculously dangerous on the road.

I don't expect to ever ride in a self driving car personally but the bar is so low for safety with distracted drivers and the target audience that you have to welcome this even if the marketing is bullshit.

Just to add I love audio books and 3-4 hour drive. I feel like that is my best thinking time.

65-70 is my age for this.

No kids/grandkids for me so I don't see much value in old age.

I have to live now and only have 15-20 good years left. Once that time comes it is time to party. Cigars, weed and rum. A broken down physical body with an even more broken down mind is a fate worse than death to me.

That is a great analogy that I had not thought of before and finance is everything to me.

I think in the same way we need to accept all regulation in this area will have flaws but flawed regulation is far better than zero regulation.

I think the problem with mythologizing and the fictional nonsense would have grown up around whatever term was originally adopted.

AGI though is just the worst. If I am consider to posses general intelligence then why I am so bad at painting? I would love to be able to paint, even to just do Picasso ripoffs but I can't even make something close after much time, effort and training on past data/paintings.

When a computer has the same type of problem though then it negates any concept of general intelligence for the computer.

Nothing short of an Artificial God will satisfy what we mean by AGI.

Our poorly defined language here is causing philosophical problems.

I think a good analogy is to artificial light. The attitude towards AI would be to not be impressed by the light bulb but be constantly waiting for some miniature Sun/star that doesn't even make sense. That light bulb is not real artificial light says the AGI fanatic.

I only quit when I notice I am smoking too often. My sweet spot is once a week to relax, listen to some music and take my mind off everything.

I also eat pretty clean most the week so eat a good meal the night I smoke. That hits the reset button for me.

I don't know how you would study such a thing but I can imagine it is not healthy to not have a reset button.

You can't hit the reset button everyday though or it will stop resetting.

The problem with the conspiracy theory is Ghislaine Maxwell would have met the same fate. It makes no sense Epstein gets wacked in jail but Maxwell outside of jail does not.

Forget medieval society, this is like 1980.

When your information was on paper in file cabinets with thousands of other people it wasn't much better than having nothing at all.

The incomprehension with his death for me was what he came from in his 40s and his daughter. I was depressed and addicted most of my 20s and Bourdain was like some kind of mythical hero in that regard. You could still be a junkie in your 40s and soar to having beers with Obama.

His death still worries me in a sense for my own life that I still want to do a ton with my life but I don't want to do quite everything. There needs to always be something to dream about, something needs to be left unfulfilled.

I can completely get for Bourdain that at the end there was no fix left. He had literally done everything in his life possible to do. What could he possibly dream about at the end? I am sure that is a much darker place then what it would seem on the surface. "Instead of killing myself, I can do anything so I should do X." He literally ran X dry.

For sure. It really has become a more distributed lottery. The people I know who are obsessed with slot machines and buying lottery tickets are the people I know that own dogecoin.

This whole thing gets more absurd as USD Coin and Binance USD climb to the top with Tether.

The whole space to me feels like such a massive waste of resources and brain power.

What is worse though is I have bought many products from non-targeted ads because I didn't even know I wanted the item until I randomly ran into.

I loved my grandmother but targeted ads always remind me of the junk my grandma would get me for Christmas. She knew enough to be in the ball park but because she was in the ball park my taste is more picky and ultimately I never liked almost anything she got me.

That is really the shocking thing at this point.

1984 has just been lapped by reality.

I think it is already a lost cause. We had the chance a decade ago to collectively show companies doing this is bad business. Instead we collectively did the opposite. You don't get a do over with this.

Maybe it is even related to this nonsense statistical thinking that has infected our group mind. Even when it doesn't apply at all, everything is a random draw from the urn.

"We just got unlucky on this draw from the urn with surveillance". Maybe next time we will have better luck even though there is no urn, draws or next time.

I have a few interests that I randomly search for on arXiv.org and try to stay on top of.

Sometimes I will just randomly see what has been posted to one of the areas I am interested in as well on arxiv.

Then often I end up just googling references in the paper to other papers.

Isn't the problem though that this doesn't work without a fiction that we all believe to be non-fiction?

You need to create a fiction that is believed in more than any individual differences but it doesn't work if we know it is fiction. The group will not be able to put aside differences for very long without it.

There is very clever aspect to what the church has done that is very hard to replicate.

I really think team sports are the closest you can get. This guy putting the ball over the goal line is the most important thing in the world and you can gel 90,000 drunk people to watch it without it becoming complete chaos. It is the same process at work.

IMO a big problem is we want to feel like we live in this high tech world so we collectively invite surveillance technology into our lives because so little interesting innovations are actually happening.

A huge bull market in surveillance because if you get rid of that our "innovations" severally lack use cases.

I still like Excel for certain things but I don't know why you wouldn't just use Pandas instead of this and cut out Excel.

I love synths so much I have basically banned myself from them.

I started with Generator in 1999, the precursor to Reaktor. I want to say it was on a 150mhz Pentium.

Reaktor is so much fun but when I think of all the time I spent on it, something more productive would have been better.

If I was going to start right now I would get a Waldorf Blofeld. Just hard to beat that synth for the price, sound and features.

I search for the latest Blofeld videos some times on youtube to get a little synth fix but that is the closest I will let myself get. If I bought a Blofeld I would do nothing all day but make weird sounds for the next 5 years.

Even as someone who hates kids I can see birth rates as huge problem.

No one is deciding though to have kids or not based on the father getting paid time off.

I think it is an easier argument that a knowledge worker who has been up all night taking care of a screaming baby is not effective anyway.

I think we should give fathers paid time off out of pity basically.

I am a Girardian newb but Girard even mentions sporting events in the article.

IMO it isn't just sporting events though but violent sporting events that let us exercise the scapegoat mechanism. At least in the US. If your team wins, it doesn't matter your background if you are both fans of the same team. I really can't think of anything that quite brings us together like team sports in the 21st century.

Obviously, if you are not a sports fan this is much harder to see.

Burning man is too obvious, literal and it just isn't that many people vs the whole of society.

I can remember as a little kid the mimetic desire to become my favorite sports stars complete with wearing a jersey with their name on my back as if I was them.

On a side note, it is an absolutely ridiculous situation that Audible has one audio book by Girard. I would love to pass the time driving in the car with a wide selection of Girard to chew on.

I think at this point what would work better is explicitly biased journalism but with multiple samples of the same story, in the same context, on the same page even.

What doesn't work for me is this pretend "unbiased" highly biased lets turn journalism into a partisan infotainment team sport form of journalism.

The Concorde was inflation adjusted $12,900 round trip and failed miserably.

It feels like every 10 years we bail out airlines when we hit a bad recession.

I would really question how much of a business model there will be for this at this price point once you don't make a headline by just taking a flight on it.

I mean I love space but I honestly don't get space tourism.

Especially if we compare today to what we should get from JWST.

Today basically seems like the ultimate roller coaster/amusement park ride.

It just makes me long for the JWST launch all the more.

The reason to use R is because someone else has already made an amazing library(usually some kind of academic research) for it that doesn't quite exist for python yet.

There is also an aspect that if you are using a technique you don't really understand you can do the same thing in python and R and compare if the results are the same.

IMO so much of age bias is because so many people are in terrible physical shape as they age.

If you are visibly in really good shape, I think you get a bias in your favor as an older person.

Not really an age bias but a perfectly rational probability of a lack of energy bias.

I just listened last night on youtube to the talk

Gyude Moore: “China in Africa: An African Perspective”

Really phenomenal discussion. I felt like my level of ignorance about Africa is pretty incredible and especially from an infrastructure perspective.

I am not sure about this article but Jian-Wei Pan looks to be doing some pretty interesting stuff with photonic devices.

I think much of this is just a language problem leading to endless communication problems and debate.

If you are going to say consciousness has degrees then what about degrees of unconsciousness?

It doesn't make sense to be more or less unconscious.

When we say conscious though we don't really mean the opposite of unconscious most of the time. Usually it is the opposite of unconscious + many other things. Then we debate what those other things are.

To me this is exactly a language philosophy problem and imprecision in our language causing philosophical problems.

It is strange we don't connect flooding the system with liquidity/bailouts and the creation of billionaires.

For my personal risk preferences I should mostly be a bond investor but we have basically made that impossible. I have to own equities to get any return. Practically everyone does so the people who own giant equity stakes in successful companies are making out like bandits.

Life advise to own a giant equity stake in a successful company is pretty absurd. Why not add be really good looking too?